Readers put in suggestions

I'm pulling suggestions for female musicians that commenters would like to highlight and bringing them up here.

Elayne points out a lovely blog post on the Indigo Girls here. I would add that generally I don't really like the acoustic singer/songwriter-y stuff, but their music is fun to listen to.

NancyP is an opera fan and would like to remind everyone of the great Maria Callas, a diva from where "diva" is a title you earned by singing, not by showing your legs on VH1.

Cuddlefish reminds us of Sue Foley, who I probably might not have remembered, even though I see her all the time on TV here in Austin. The conventional wisdom is that women can't play blues guitar, and because of this Bonnie Raitt is given the token treatment--I've actually heard sexist fans say she's the exception that proves the rule. Too bad for them that fantastic guitarists like Sue Foley are out there to make you wonder how many exceptions does it take before you realize there are no rules?

Since we have a sampling from all sorts of musical genres, I thought I would bring up someone I was listening to last night who prided herself on her ability to sample from all sorts of musical genres--Nina Simone. She would probably consider herself a folk singer, but she tended to sing everything from jazz and blues to Broadway tunes to folk music. Nina never intended to be a singer at the beginning--she was a piano player, but it was hard for her to get jobs unless she sang as well.